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Organizing Your Recipe Collection & Meal Plans

Meal planning is so important – it helps you save time, money, and makes meal prep so much easier! Organizing your recipe collection will make it even easier to prepare healthy meal plans for your whole family and cut down on household clutter!

Organizing Your Recipes to simplify meal planning

As a busy work at home mom, homeschooler and wife – I realize how important it is to plan ahead for our meals each week.  I use Plan To Eat to create my meal plans quickly and easily.  Not only can I simply point and click to build my menu for the week or month, I can house all of my favorite recipes in one easy location, so no more hunting to see which cookbook a recipe was in or having to wing it because I can't find the website I found it on!

Plan To Eat has several great ways to help you make your menu planning easier.  It is especially useful to those who work outside the home and may not have as much time to sit down and go through hundreds of recipes and write out a list.  This organizing tool will help you easily plan your menu and create an easy to follow shopping list all in one place!

Organizing Your Recipes & Meal Planning

  1. Sign up for a free 30-day trial!
  2. Install the bookmarklet. If you have any trouble with this, click on help in the top right. They have tutorials to get you started.
  3. Head to Pinterest or your favorite websites to start saving recipes.  You can also manually add your own recipes & even keep track of where you found them. I was able to donate many of my cookbooks without any guilt because I only used 2 or 3 recipes out of them.Saving Recipes with Plan to Eat
  4. Once you have your recipes saved, head to the planner! You'll start with a blank calendar like below.  Drag & drop from the recipes on the left to start planning.Using Plan to Eat for Meal Planning
  5. You can also add ingredients and notes.  I use this for meals that I don't need a recipe for and snacks.Using Plan to Eat for Meal Planning
  6. Once you have your week (or month) planned out, check it over to make sure it is correct & you aren't forgetting anything!  Recipes & ingredients are in yellow, green, and blue. Notes are in white.  You may notice on the 7th, Breakfast Skillet is in white, followed by a yellow list of ingredients.  I don't need a recipe for that, but I do need to remember to pick up those items. At the end of each day is a note section.  Use it to create notes for yourself, like pull roast from the freezer, or chop up veggies for breakfast.
    Using Plan to Eat for Meal Planning
  7. After you've gone over your menu, it's time to prepare your shopping list.  This is my least favorite part of meal planning, but Plan to Eat makes it so easy!  Adjust your list to add things you need & delete things you already have on hand.  There is a restore button in case you accidentally delete the wrong thing or realize someone used all the ground beef.  You can either export the list & import into Out of Milk or print it.Creating a Shopping List with Plan to Eat
  8. If you chose to print, you can even include a recipe key. This way, if the store doesn't have anything you need for a recipe you can look at the other items and see if you can substitute it or quickly plan a replacement meal, and avoid buying things you don't need now.Creating a Shopping List with Plan to Eat

Plan to Eat is one of my favorite organizing tools & something I have come to rely on to make my life easier. In just a few minutes, you can put together a healthy meal plan for your family, and have your shopping list ready to go!

Looking for more organizing tips?  Check out the entire 31 Days to an Organized Home series!

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